Day 9 of the 12 Days of Montreal Christmas - Geneology of your tourtiere

Photograph by: Dawn Lemieux
, The Gazette

MONTREAL - Mention tourtière at the hairdresser or in the garage waiting to have the snow tires put on and you are likely to spark a lively debate.

A mix of pork and ground beef?

Sacrilege!! Pork only, ground.

No, cubed or diced.

Wild game, if you can get it.

Potatoes for sopping up the juices.

No way!

Butter in the pastry dough for flavour.

No, lard for flakiness.

A little mace in the spicing?

Heaven forbid, unless you're from the Saguenay.

Pickled beets, homemade relish or store-bought ketchup served on the side? It depends.

Québécois are proud of their tourtière. And protective, too. The word itself conjures tradition, history, aunts and grandmothers in the kitchen. Everybody's Mamie makes the best ones.

Around the holidays, you can often tell where in the province a person's family comes from by their tourtière. That's because recipes for the savoury meat pies with golden flaky pastry that are the centerpiece of Québécois Christmas and New Year's reveillons vary from region to region.

What we call tourtière is in fact an all-encompassing term for a variety of different dishes. From Saguenay-Lac St. Jean, comes "la tourte," a deep-dish, multi-level pie cooked in a cast iron casserole that was once made with a now-extinct wild bird of the same name.

In Gaspé and on the Lower North Shore, tourtière becomes cipaille, or cipâte with six alternating layers of pastry and slow-simmered meat, including wild game - everything from hare and rabbit to moose, venison, partridge, goose and caribou, whatever the hunter in the family brought home.

In Quebec City, tourtière is called pâté a la viande and is made with diced or cubed pork (and even rolled oats.)

In and around Montreal, tourtière is more of a classic, low-slung pie made with ground pork or a combination of pork and beef.

Even the spices are a matter of endless debate.

Arik DeVienne, whose family owns La Dépense and Olives et Épices, the spice stores at Jean Talon Market, says his parents, Ethné and Philippe DeVienne, searched culinary archives in Quebec City and found old tourtière recipes calling for as many as 13 different spices.

"Québécois spicing is not bland and tourtières take on many flavours," he said.

Not everybody agrees. Quebec culinary historian Anne Fortin, owner of the cookbook store Librairie Gourmande, says romantics and city folks might be willing to tamper with tradition, but she believes that, in general, Québécois don't play with the tourtière spices too much. And for the most part the rural families of the past didn't have access to exotic flavourings.

For more detail, view our chart below or, if you're reading this on a tablet or smartphone, swipe across or scroll down and click on the attached chart.

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